Monthly Archives: July 2011

I’m currently playing in the British Major Open, and I thought I’d use the rest day to give a quick update here. So far it’s going rather well; I’m on 4/6, with a rating performance of 2184. I need 3.5/5 in week 2 in order to qualify for next year’s British Championship (main section), so that’s the aim.

In other news, the new English Chess Federation grades came out last week, and I’ve had a modest increase to 162. However, this was quite heavily affected by my poor performance in Paignton at the start of the season; if this was discounted (which seems reasonable, given that I was just starting to study then), my new grade would be in the 170s. My ECF performance at the Major Open so far is exactly 200, but it remains to be seen whether I can maintain that level over an extended period.

As predicted in WPR 40, my girlfriend was a highly disruptive influence last week, so I only managed about 13 hours. This week will be largely about getting a few repertoire tweaks in some sort of working order in time for the Major Open which starts next week. Hic naufragii (yes, I know that’s wrong):

Friday: 3 hours playing, analysing and discussing ways to train with an old friend from junior tournaments

Saturday/Sunday: A considerable amount of time reading about and thinking about the optimal way to train. I’ll guess at 6 hours.

As can be seen above, I’m currently having a minor crisis about how to train, but I intend to set this aside, at least to an extent, until after my two upcoming tournaments (which can be seen on the calendar page).

Hello and welcome to another weekly round-up. I do intend to do these on Monday, but a casual observer would be forgiven for assuming that I used a random number generator to decide on which day of the week to write them. The bad news is that, as predicted in WPR #38, last week wasn’t particularly productive; I only managed 4 hours 55 minutes. The good news is that I’m now in an excellent routine, and am on course to manage 40 hours this week. Voici la répartition:

Thursday: 30 minutes finishing off Gallagher’s book (which I found to be a useful refresher even though I’ve played the King’s Indian for years), 10 minutes playing an ICC 15-minute game, 50 minutes Dvoretsky’s Endgame Manual

The second piece of bad news is that I’ve come to the conclusion that I can’t afford to play tournaments in Europe this summer. The corresponding piece of good news is that I will be active on the British tournament circuit, and so far have entered the British Major Open and the e2e4 Sunningdale International. Both are FIDE-rated, and both should offer a relatively strong and uniform field (in particular the latter, which is a round robin).